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I don’t consider myself a social media maven, but there’s something I really like about the hashtag #QTheFuture.

Not long after the revelations about Jian Gomeshi’s string of abuses came out, the team of CBCers behind Q started asking their audience to use it to make Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ posts with ideas for the show’s life post-Jian. Fans are tweeting about their favourite ideas for a new host (Piya Chattoopadhyay would be my pick – she’s such a great interviewer), whether the name should be changed to Zed, and how to change the culture of the workplace to protect staff from sexual harassment. I’m totally bewildered that Norm MacDonald seems to be the Twitterverse’s pick for the next host.

What I like about it is that is essentially hopeful, and it makes obvious that nobody does this work alone. I know I’m not the only one who feels conned realizing that so many of our favourite interviews with people like Caitlin Moran and Rich Aucoin were hosted by a man with a shadow life of brutal sexual aggression. But every great interview you ever heard Jian do — and any that sound retroactively sleazy now — was the product of a team. There were people racing through books to find brilliant authors, people calling up bands and doing fastidious pre-interviews, people writing up scripts for Jian to read on air, and people continuing the conversation on their website and social media. Hosting is an incredibly important role, but it’s just one among many that create great radio.

Recognizing that fact, I’d like to recommend a few ways you can help great artists make some great work. First of course, you should definitely shout out to Q with the hashtag #QTheFuture.

Next, you should donate to help Radiotopia and Canadaland thrive. Radiotopia is the luminous new podcast network that brings together shows like 99% Invisible, Strangers, Theory of Everything, Love + Radio, and more. They’re really close to their goal of 20,000 backers on Kickstarter, and it’s going towards really worthwhile things like subsidizing health care for 99% Invisible producers (single payer rules, but kudos for working with what they’ve got) and bringing new shows online to make sure half of them are now hosted by women.

Lastly, you should pick up a copy of Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience, and Renewal in the Arctic Wild by Jennifer Kingsley. I have the honour of being a friend of hers, and I’m really adoring this guide to her journey paddling down the Back and Baillie Rivers in the tundra. Ordinarily I wouldn’t find a book about someone else’s journey gripping, but she really sells it by peeling back layer after layer of skin to reveal little truths about herself, and about how we relate to wilderness.

When she’s talking about her pre-trip anxiety, it shows as much about her as it does about what it means to survive. There’s a scene where a trip companions named Jen wants to fire a test shot from a plastic pistol meant to scare away bears, and Jennifer’s picturing herself trapped out in the wild with a bear circling for days to slowly hunt them down.

It would be my turn to hold the bear off, and I would reach into the plastic bag, powdery and acific, only to find we had used every little packet of sound and light.

My irrational fear and mumblings of complaint continued as Jen jammed the cartridge in place and fired.

“There,” she said. “Easy.”

And she was on to the next thing, dinner, while I stood on the bank, trapped by my imagination.

Or how about this gem: “Going into the wild is like going to sleep; you get there in stages.”

Paddlenorth is her first book, and I think it’s a fantastic read.

Nobody makes a book, or a podcast, or a great interview, alone. So let’s give some love to the people making great stuff out there.

Edit: I feel embarrassed seeing that my last post before this lauded Jian Gomeshi as a great host. This is the pain many Canadians are feeling right now – those of us who he didn’t directly hurt: that radio makes a host seem intimate and knowable, but dark water of fame and distance can hide what they’re really like.

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Before I worked at CBC, I used to think hosts like Eleanor Wachtel and Jian Gomeshi were superhuman. Not only had they read all the books they were interviewing authors about, they had beautifully well-developed questions ready in a tidy narrative arc. Then I started working as a producer behind the scenes and realized I’d be pre-interviewing the guests and coming up with a lot of those beautiful questions.

But the achievement still stands that these great hosts are doing a massive amount of reading to be prepared to talk to their guests. I’ve been doing a lot of preparatory reading for stories myself lately. It’s eerie how much of a thrill it is to know you’ve done your homework when you pick up the phone or start prattling on in front of a microphone.

One of Raymond Biesinger’s outlandish illustrations in She of the Mountains

This week, you’ll be able to read a story I wrote for Vue Weekly about Vivek Shraya’s fantastic new novel She of the Mountains. I interviewed Vivek a few years ago about his documentary What I LOVE About Being QUEER, and She shares many of its themes in exploring race, sexuality, and searching for a sense of belonging. I guarantee you’ve never read a novel like it, though. It’s an almost minimalist love story about a man searching for a way to reconcile his love of both men and women, learning to love himself, interwoven with the domestic blisses and bloody battles of Hindu gods and goddesses.

More recently, I got to race through Edmonton political affairs commentator Satya Das’ book The Best Country: Why Canada Will Lead the Future in anticipation of moderating a panel talk for ACGC. I love hosting events like this, because there’s so much research and craft that goes into guiding a conversation among speakers with vastly different perspectives live with an audience.

And my last blast of preparatory reading this summer was for Terra Informa. We had a summer reading club, where we reviewed wilderness journey Being Caribou, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Year of the Flood, and the dense eco-poetry book Kill-Site. It’s exciting to have a springboard in front of me with sticky notes and scribbles in the margin, from which I can leap off into questions about That Moment You First Heard Pierre Trudeau Speak, or What Stories From Your Childhood Inspired This Battle Scene.

In summary, feel free to give me homework that I can turn into a story or an engaging conversation in front of an audience. I crave it.

I’m about to take a big move. After two years working at the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation, I’ve decided to take a leap into a job in radio. This month I will become the News Coordinator at CJSR 88.5 FM, the Edmonton community radio station where I’ve been working on Terra Informa.

I love my team at Terra Informa. It embodies many of the best things I like about storytelling and volunteering. Our team is willing to take risks, like traipsing around in the snow and rattling the fence outside a planetarium after dark to narrate a whole episode about night. Everybody genuinely cares about each other, and recording together always feels like friends sitting down to have a good conversation. Now I’m going to be managing the current and new rosters of volunteer contributors for all of CJSR’s Spoken Word shows, from our queer community anchor GayWire to University of Alberta partnerships like The Gateway Presents.

I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with CJSR’s impressive base of volunteers and community supporters and build on our legacy of independent, award-winning spoken word programming that challenges the status quo. My predecessor Matt Hirji has a gigantic mural of Ira Glass on his wall, good-naturedly watching out, eyes clearly curious and hungry as all get out. Ira will be hovering over me too on my new journey. Wish me luck.

Finn Sound’s paintings are riddles in geometry, abstract symbol, and colour. They’re like individual cells of an unseen body, each one containing the DNA of the larger coded and playful landscape.

Finn Sound is my boyfriend. And this weekend, that landscape is on display at Art Walk on Edmonton’s Whyte Ave.

When I first met him, he told me he was working on about 20 different canvases, piece by piece, all at the same time. It makes sense when you see the twisted arms, peaks, and scraps of memories that keep making appearances.

I love his stuff because it’s usually both tense and whimsical. Mad god-like creatures, ceolocanths, squid, his family, churches… they all intrude, and he doesn’t seem to be able to predict when they do.

I’m helping him show off his work this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10-5. We’re on the south side of Whyte Ave, between 105 and 106 Street. Come by and see the body of work he’s calling “Red Mountain Fragments.” It’s a world worth swimming in.

This spring, I’ve had the chance to peek into what life without ID looks like in Canada, interview one of Canada’s most interesting authorities on environmental policy, and produce the most music-centred story I’ve ever done for Terra Informa.

A close-up look of the stone harp that Páll invented.

First off, the story I made for the many people who asked to hear the recordings I made of artist Páll Guðmundsson while I was in Iceland. This story was a mix of liquid luck and preparation that paid off. If ferry workers hadn’t been striking in south Iceland where we originally wanted to go, our friends at the tourist bureau in Reykjavík would never have recommended we go check out Páll’s rock sculptures in his tiny summer village of Húsafell. Fortunately I had packed my pocket-sized Zoom audio recorder just in case I met someone life changing, whose story I absolutely needed to tell.

Have you ever gone somewhere new and had the feeling that you’ve been there before? Imagine going away on a trip and finding that everything you see reminds you of home: the stores have the same shape and sell the same clothes, the restaurants serve the same sort of food, the people listen to the same kind of music…

What about somewhere embraces its own character and qualities? That’s what I saw in Páll Guðmundsson, an artist whose local and naturally inspired work makes his home feel one-of-a-kind. Listen from about 10:18:

Scott Vaughan, plus my hand.

Next, my interview with Scott Vaughan, Canada’s former Environment Commissioner and the new President and CEO of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). IISD just took a big leap forward for themselves, and for aquatic science in Canada, by successfully negotiating to become the new operator of the Experimental Lakes Area in northern Ontario. It’s one of Canada’s most important (and most famous) scientific research facilities.

There, scientists have a unique ability to conduct experiments on entire lake ecosystems — in some cases, their research lasts over decades. The research there has caused major changes in the way we live in Canada: like how acid rain affects freshwater fish, and how phosphates in our detergents can cause algae blooms.

But in 2013, the federal government said it felt the Experimental Lakes Area’s research was no longer necessary, and to be be shut down. That set off a mad scramble from environmental groups, activists, and researchers around the world to find a way to keep it alive.

I got a chance to meet Scott Vaughan at the Zero 2014 sustainability conference in Edmonton to discuss how the year of upheaval will affect the research at the ELA, and what he learned about the federal government’s attitude towards research during his time as Canada’s Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. We had a frank talk about whether he and the other parliamentary officers who’ve irritated the government ever get together and commiserate, but regrettably I had to cut it out of this Terra Informa story. The rest still makes for a fascinating story, I think. Listen from about 1:28:

Finally, this week I finally got a story out that I’ve had in my head for a long time. Last year, I noticed a flyer up in the Stanley A Milner library in downtown Edmonton, advertising an ID storage service at Boyle Street Community Services. I was intensely curious why anyone would need to have the centre lock their ID away. It led me down a rabbit hole of the frustrations that face seniors, homeless people, the recently-incarcerated, anyone who wasn’t born in Canada, and ultimately, our democracy.